Touchstone's Editors and Allies on News and Events of the Day

July 03, 2006

The Laugh of the Future

Norton (appearing in a television commercial, wearing a chef's hat and standing in front of an array of household utensils): Are you the Chef of the Future?Ralph (facing the camera, eyes bugged out; holding something that looks like a Swiss Army knife crossed with a pencil sharpener and ice pick): Hamahamahamahama the Chef of the Future!Norton: And do you have something that will do the work of ALL these old-fashioned tools?Ralph: Hamahama the Chef of the Future!

As our civilization slouches and slides further into paganism, I ask myself what life will look like, and in particular what good things we take for granted now will be lost. It's not an exercise in prophecy so much as a recalling of how Christianity transformed the old pagan world. If we revert to paganism, for a time the Christian transformation will be in part retained, if only as ghostly memories from a world whose distinctiveness no one any longer understands. But, barring a revival of the Christian faith, even those memories must fade.

So here let me pay tribute to an apparently humble pleasure that Christianity brought to the world, one that was only vaguely anticipated by the ancient Greeks and Romans. I mean the pleasure of a certain kind of comedy. Laughter there had always been, of course, but for cultures untouched by the Christian "deep comedy" (about which our contributing editor Peter Leithart has written most eloquently), laughter seldom or never escapes the realm of scorn. Aristotle, that keen analyst of drama, says that in comedy we laugh at the vices of people who are beneath us, and certainly that definition holds true -- to a certain extent -- through the Christian era, too. We laugh at Bottom, the ass translated into an ass. We laugh at Don Quixote, who mistakes a statue of the Virgin Mary for a damsel in distress. We laugh at Charlie Brown, who tries to steal home with two outs in the final inning of the championship game, is tagged out nine feet from the plate, and lies on his back through the night, crying out, "Why? Why? Why?" And we laugh at vain, blustery, foolish Ralph Kramden the bus driver, once again blowing his meager savings on a harebrained scheme, once again seeing his so-little-justified pride shot down in flames.

But there is a great deal more to comedy that is steeped in the Christian world -- and those very examples I've given above prove it. Plautus is full of fools, but only the Christian Shakespeare could give us Bottom's Vision, "that has no bottom". It took divine revelation to teach us that there is a foolishness wiser than the wisdom of men; or that in the lowliest and stupidest of men there is a grandeur and a mystery that should make us laugh not for scorn but for wonder. One old Shakespearean critic has called it the Comedy of Forgiveness -- the strange belief, quite foreign to the pagans, that laughter too might be redemptive, as participating in the greatest comedy of all, that of a world wherein man is saved by the means he least expects, and therefore by the most fitting and comical means of all. For the fact is that we like Bottom not just as a source of laughter, but as Bottom and no other; as we like Don Quixote, and Charlie Brown, and the fat bus driver Ralph Kramden. We like them because we take for granted that they are of inestimable value, and because we know that they replicate, in particularly ridiculous form, a story that is our own. Hence the forgiveness that haunts the poor, sad, lonely marriage of Ralph and Alice, which would otherwise be intolerable for the audience to watch -- an exercise in cruelty.

What happens when that comic vision is lost? For a while it hangs around in debased form: you have a vampire forgiveness, pale and bloodless. People sort-of-forgive one another because they sort-of-reconcile, but, having lost any clear notion of sin, they don't know what they are forgiving, and having lost any clear notion of redemption, they don't know why they should bother, other than to call a truce acceptable to all parties. But soon that sort-of-forgiveness is seen as sentimental, tacked-on, not integral to the comedy; and then it is dispensed with. The laughter of fellow-feeling for silly and suffering mankind -- the laughter of Krazy Kat, or As You Like It -- must disappear, with crudity and cruelty and scorn returning in full force. In large part this has already happened.

17 Comments

My wife and I are currently working our way through all of the old "Honeymooners" episodes on DVD, and the lines with which you open your post happen to be from one of my favorite ones. Your analysis is dead-on. It also applies to the 21-DVD set of Laurel & Hardy that is next on our viewing list, and the great silent comics such as Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and Arbuckle.

Now, I also happen to be a big "Three Stooges" fan (and just ordered a 20-DVD set of all 190 of their shorts). Are they beyond the pale in your view?

Great post! I have been troubled by a lack of forgiveness in recent movies.

For example, in the movie "13 Going on 30" the heroine who is fortunate enough to start her life over at age 13, as one of her first do-overs punches her friend in the face. I think the first time I noticed the trend was in that movie about the truck drivers who'd kidnapped a man's wife (sorry I don't remember the name) where at the end the hero deliberately drops a truck on the villian and kills him.

I'm not sure there isn't room for both the Christian and Pagan styles of comedy in a Christian artistic culture (I was first introduced to these categories by Prof. Alan Jacobs at Wheaton, so Dr. Esolen is far from alone in noticing the difference). I think I can enjoy Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, two of the finest recent Pagan comedies (in my opinion), without guilt; the humor is generated by perceiving justice in the ironic punishment of misbehavior. These comedies develop a vision of a world of cosmic order in which arrogance, meanness, or plain idiocy always comes back to harm the sinner. Curb's Larry David is a paradigmatic example, getting into minor scrapes which a little simple politeness would easily diffuse, and then through his own boorishness and inflexibility turning them into catastrophes.

Just as forgiveness is superior to punishment in the cosmic order, though, the Christian, forgiveness-oriented form does seem to be a higher art, and it is worrisome to see the greater form exchanged for the lesser on a wide scale.

I've been thinking about this a lot, too, and I think you're on the mark, Dr. Esolen. Barbara Nicolosi had some remarks along these lines on her blog a while back, too. I haven't been able to satisfy myself that there's a clear line of delineation, but it seems to me that much of the comedy that young people like most these days has a core of real meanness that's new. Or maybe very old. Consider the cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy, especially the latter. It's as if satire no longer implies the sane norm, but simply expresses a subjective personal scorn.

A notable exception is King of the Hill. Hank Hill is a great American.

The earlier Simpsons, although unlikely to have many actual Christians on its writing staff, did have the old comedic spirit. Homer was a well-meaning loser like Ralph Kramden, and his relationship with Marge had a core of real affection. Many early episodes, and even some recent ones, have resolutions bordering on sentimentality. In recent years Homer has become more genuinely loathsome, a figure of contempt rather than sympathy, and the show's plots have become more mean, but it is still not in the same category as the loathsome Family Guy.

The Yiddish stories of Isaac Singer are wonderful. What to say about them? First, the Jews are our elder brothers in the faith, and much of what we finally learned about laughter we learned from them. (Example: the medieval writer of the poem Patience might easily have been a Jew who appreciated the humor of the story of that unwilling prophet.) Second, Jewish humor has also long been embedded in the folklore of a Europe that was already Christian; so that Singer's tales really sound similar to the Italian folk tales compiled by Italo Calvino. So I guess that what applies to Christian humor applies also to Jewish humor, with the important reservation that with the Incarnation, Christian humor turns towards the unexpected (and sometimes very small) savior, in a way that is prepared by the Old Testament (Joseph) but not made entirely clear.

My brother-in-law is a huge fan of Hank Hill, but I've never seen the show (having sworn off network television about 13-14 years ago). I do think The Three Stooges fit the general Sad Sack mold, along with all the great clowns and pantomime artists. It's telling that you can't even imagine a Red Skelton nowadays. Or the nebbish (but extraordinarily athletic, under that nebbish exterior) Harold Lloyd. Or Buster Keaton. Or the self-deprecating Victor Borge.

An interesting and ongoing discussion in our family concerns the relative merits of Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball. My nod goes to The Great One, but Lucy has it all over him for technique and delivery, at least in the old I Love Lucy shows. But there's a line that Lucy would never cross: the line that plunges laughter in sorrow, or sorrow in laughter. That line Jackie crossed all the time. He was a bad Catholic who felt guilty about his many self-destructive sins and who let success go to his head. May he rest in peace.

I would certainly never suggest that anyone who's sworn off network tv go off the wagon for King of the Hill, but if you're going to watch at all you can do far worse. I wrote something a while back on my web site about the dearth of mature adults in popular entertainment and someone replied that Hank Hill is an exception. I'd never thought about it but within my limited acquaintance of the field it seems true. Probably significant that the most decent guy on tv is a cartoon character. Not that there aren't plenty of things to object to in the show--a degree of crudity, some mockery of religion (also some memorable mockery of liberal religion)--but it manages to make fun of its characters while holding them in some kind of affection, even the obnoxious Dale.

I went ten years or more without ever seeing The Simpsons. I finally saw an episode while visiting someone who's a fan, and was very surprised, and maybe slightly dismayed, to find it very funny. It included a rich environmentalist who travelled to some gathering in a small aircraft "powered by my own sense of self-satisfaction."

It is very hard to evade the entertainment beast. I never used to watch tv at all, allowing very little of it in the house, for the sake of my children. So when they got old enough they just watched it somewhere else. Several of them love Family Guy, which is like the devil mocking my efforts.

The Marx Brothers, my favorite film/tv comedians, should be mentioned here. They skewer pride and pomposity mercilessly, but with the sense that they're saying "See how wonderful life could be if you stopped being that way."

"I take it you wouldn't approve of the Department of Veterans Affairs approval of a Wiccan pentacle on a soldier's tombstone"

What did that have to do with the post? The paganism mentioned wasn't specifically Wicca.I don't see anything wrong with the Dept's decision, though; the soldier's religion was wrong, but one still has a right to put one's religious emblems on one's tombstone.

Interestingly, the show that I think is now among the funniest sitcom on television is about a guy who realizes he's made a mess of his life through all the bad stuff he's done, and now in order to make amends has made a list of all the people he has hurt. It's called My Name is Earl. Each week he checks off one item on his list. He makes it right. And we laugh with him. We laugh with his foibles, with the complications that come from doing things wrong, with the complications that come from doing things right.

We laugh along with his redemption, which can often be a very funny process.

Thanks for your further post. I would add that I dissent from your characterization of the "the poor, sad, lonely marriage of Ralph and Alice". Maybe in the beginning, but in later episodes the marriage has real warmth, richness, and love to it, with the classic ending line, "Baby, you're the greatest." (E.g. the episode where Alice turns down a chance to become an actress. The director was impressed by her reading of lines in a love scene with Ralph, and Alice tells the latter that she said those lines so naturally because she wasn't acting.)

Perhaps somewhat oddly, I originally had a difficult time with the Marx brothers. Like the Three Stooges, they were totally subversive of normal society; but unlike them they were deliberately so, and with a salacious edge that bothered me. Even more ironcially, then, it was when I saw "Duck Soup" that I finally realized their distinctive genius and could then appreciate their other films.